Editor's note: It's sad to see a series that was once popular with both critics and gamers fall on hard times. Tony Hawk isn't the first series to wear out its welcome, and it won't be the last. Hopefully its decline will cause publishers and developers to at least pause for a moment before they churn out a sequel to their popular game just to make a quick buck. - Aaron

Tony Hawk: Ride is a critical mess, and it seems likely to become an equal commercial disappointment. Yet it's hard to believe that only ten years ago, back in 1999, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater exploded onto the scene. In a time when sports gaming was defined by Madden (well, some things don't change), the original THPS offered an alternative. It was a game that threw realism to the wind in favor of an experience that was fun.

Sure, THPS was a skating game. There were half pipes, grind rails, and all that stuff. But that wasn't what made the game appealing. While a traditional sports game is competitive, THPS was skill based. You'd grind from rail to rail into 900's and double back-flips, defying the laws of gravity and possibly skate board magnetism, all in the name of a high score.

As the series attempted to evolve with further sequels, new features were added. Some of the features, like the manual and the revert, added to the ease of extending long trick combos. Others added player-created-features, like Create-A-Skater or Create-A-Park. Still, all seemed well in the kingdom of Tony Hawk, which had quickly become one of the biggest gaming franchises around.

So when did things start to go sour? While the greed for yearly sequels and the over-saturation that came with that was surely a factor, I still think there's more to the story. After all, other franchises, like Madden, have released yearly installments without taking the same hit to popularity that Tony Hawk did.

It was as soon as the game became overly complicated that things began to go south for the franchise. Instead of time constrained, smaller levels that pushed for a fun and frantic race towards objectives, the games began to open up.

Starting with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, levels were now large, open worlds, were players had to skate around to find objectives to complete. The Underground games largely revolved around story modes, which were extraneous and didn't really add much to the game. None of these additions seemed to be detracting from the core game all that much at first, but the original, arcadey Tony Hawk experience that we had all fallen in love with was getting too big for its own good. We were witnessing a decline by degrees.

The leap to the Xbox 360 forced Activision to bring its popular franchise to a new, more powerful generation of consoles. Their result was Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, which basically saw the series' already overly big levels, get even bigger. Still, the bigger they got, the emptier and less creative they felt.

With Project 8 and Proving Ground, things only got larger and more complicated, and reviews for the once critically acclaimed series became mediocre. In the mean time, Activison had found new super franchises in Guitar Hero and Call of Duty. It seemed like it was time for Tony Hawk to finally take a rest.

But not for long. Only two years after Proving Ground was released, Activision has released Tony Hawk: Ride, a game that attempts to give Tony Hawk the Guitar Hero treatment by making the game peripheral dependent. Yet all they seem to have accomplished is to somehow make the series even more complicated, this time by forcing players to fall over themselves trying to manipulate a skateboard without wheels.

Now we are faced with the death of a franchise. A franchise that maybe overstayed its welcome, and one that never really figured out how to evolve from its basic premise into anything better. I choose not to ridicule Tony Hawk, despite the hilarious failure Tony Hawk: Ride has become. I will instead thank Tony Hawk for the memories. Who knows, perhaps someday we'll see a Tony Hawk game that remembers what made the series great to begin with. It could be worse. At least the game's poster boy isn't tied up in a celebrity sex scandal.

-Mike Minotti (still jobless, but my high scores in THPS3 were legendary)

See this post and more on my site: Give Mike Minotti A Gaming Journalism Job.